For family, God, and country: The Mexican right and the political culture of a revolutionary state, 1929-1940.

Abstract

United in a quest to restore order, preserve hierarchy, and avoid profound change in Mexican society, different components of the political right resisted the Revolutionary regime from 1929 to 1940. Catholic peasants in the Bajio joined lay organizations and persisted in armed Cristero rebellion as they rejected socialist education in the mid-1930s. Industrialists, who had given tacit support to the government in the Maximato, were slow to organize but vigorous in their fight against the labor policies of Lazaro Cardenas's administration from 1935 to 1940. Urban middle sectors attempted to vote the government out of power with the 1929 presidential campaign of Jose Vasconcelos, and mobilized even more effectively a decade later--joined by northern ranchers fearful of continued agrarian reform. Weak and frayed by personalism during the Maximato, the right coalesced only after a frail electoral effort in 1934, when the rise of radicalism prodded it to action. Aware of cardenismo's vision for Mexico, and cognizant of the decline of its institutional bulwarks of army and church, by 1937 the right offered a fresh political discourse on family, faith, womanhood, and nation. It engaged the Revolutionary establishment on these issues with devastating effect, placing the Cardenas government on the defensive and forcing a fundamental shift rightward in body politic by 1940.